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Thursday, June 21, 2007

A Most Satisfying Way of Nuking Spam

I hate spam, be it unsolicited emails, SMS messages, or phone calls. I recently heard of another service in the arsenal against spam: SPAMfighter. They have a free service, and a paid one. The free service has limitations and it displays ads in your Outlook or Outlook Express program. Personally I think the idea sucks.But the SPAMfighter add-in for Outlook works so well that I was willing to pay the R180 per year to get the "pro" version. It took some persistence to do so, as I had to fight with their online store, but I won in the end.Why pay for another service when I've already got a paid spamcop.net email address? Simply because some mails slip through the spamcop.net filters, and the M-Web spam filters, and they drive me nuts. This service has been pretty good at identifying the critters that get through. I "store" all the spam in Outlook's "deleted items" folder, instead of the default "SpamFighter" folder.How many mails slip through spamcop.net? About one or two a day; another 70 or so get caught by spamcop.net, and never make it to my mailbox in the first place. Why spammers even bother with spamcop.net addresses beats me, but then I guess they're just stupid, or greedy, or both.When you download the SPAMfighter software you get a free 30 day license for the "pro" version. If you plan to buy the program, wait until day 31 before you buy: the 1 year license does not get added to the 30 day trial, but starts immediately, so I go suckered out of 3 weeks free service. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express and unsolicited emails drive you crazy, this service is just for you. If you find a message that gets through, just click on the "Block" button and that message is then sent to their mail servers and all other SPAMfighter users get their copies of the same message blocked. So it gets deleted from over 3 million other inboxes, of which 8028 are users in South Africa, where I live. The stats on their home page make for interesting reading, assuming they're true.Some time ago I bought SpamEater Pro, which is also a great anti-spam program, but you have to run it before you do a send and receive, and that became a hassle when I got my spamcop.net account, because there were so few spam messages left. This method is simpler, and you get the satisfaction of automatically warning others which email messages are a nuisance.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hi thereI also detest spam! I used Mailwasher for a long time, which works fine, but you still have to delete (and bounce) all your spam messages each day. So I've just signed up with ClearMyMail.com. I'm still on the month's free trial - but immediately have been deeply impressed. Basically, once they know which mail you normally receive through your Address Book, they simply stop Spam reaching your In Box dead in their tracks. I used to get about 100 Spam messages a day. That has now been reduced to NONE!! To date I cannot fault the service.I do hope this information is useful to your readers. I assure you, I am writing to you as an independent user.